


a little bit of love never hurt

by wjjmwmsn5



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Gen, nat is peter’s big sis and she just wants to see him Thrive, not literally his big sis like his big sis figure, spider buddies!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 23:16:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14904050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wjjmwmsn5/pseuds/wjjmwmsn5
Summary: Peter and Nat somehow come across each other on the same rooftop in New York while they’re both looking for a breather. And Nat has some feelings about the dumb shit Peter gets himself into.





	a little bit of love never hurt

**Author's Note:**

> requested to me at my tumblr transpeterparkers
> 
> let me know if you enjoy!

Peter Parker swung through the sky, eyes closed, feeling weightless and like he could let go and  _ float _ , drift through the sky like a bird gliding through the air. He opened his eyes at the last minute and kept himself from flying face-first into the windows of the big office building. He hung there for a moment though, his fingers pressed against the metal, against the outside of the floor with the curtains closed, hiding the inside. And he began the ascent, slowly rising up to the roof of the building. He needed a breather, even though he knew he’d be getting phone calls from May if he didn’t get home soon. 

But it was so nice out that night. Not so hot that his suit was just a little suffocating, and not so cool that he was shivering in his skin-tight superhero outfit. It was perfect. The kind of weather that lent itself to weightlessness, to birdlike fantasies. Peter loved what he could do, but days and nights like these made him wish there was a way to fly. Not like Tony did, but for real. Could a radioactive bird bite him too, maybe? That’d be convenient. 

As he climbed over the edge of the building and let go of his webbing, no longer worried about dropping, he oriented himself, hanging over the side with his feet dangling. 

His gut went on high alert. His stomach flipped like he was about to feel nauseous and a shiver inched its way down his spine. He turned around without a second thought, knowing something— _ someone _ —was behind him—

A bright red ponytail and a cautious, familiar face met him. It was… Black Widow? In sweats, like she just lived in this office building, and was getting some fresh air on the rooftop. But, like, when did anything to do with the Avengers ever make sense? He guessed he wouldn’t question it that much.

“Oh. Kid. What are you doing here?” she asked. She seemed kind of on high alert. But he guessed he did sneak up on her just as much as she surprised him by being up here. What a fucking coincidence, but sometimes New York was like that. 

“I can swing around, what are  _ you  _ doing up here?” he asked, curiosity bubbling over before he could stop it, before he could tell himself to let mysteries stay mysteries, like on cool TV shows or weirdly fallible heist movies. “I mean, uh, how are you, Miss Black Widow, ma’am?” He twisted his face up like  _ Is this helping any?  _ but, of course, she couldn’t see that. 

“I was doing a job inside. Thought I’d take a breather,” she explained after just a moment’s pause. Ooh, did that pause mean he was  _ in  _ on something? Like in on spy stuff? That was even cooler than being in on some of Mr. Stark’s stuff. Mr. Stark was an even more well-known Avenger but he wasn’t a fucking  _ spy.  _ “How old are you again? Why aren’t you… at home? Or doing… homework?”

He felt more than heard something gnarled in her voice, something clawing up from her chest. Fuck, he  _ felt  _ that, had been feeling it since a building descended on him and left him more claustrophobic than he had any right being as a superhero with a mask and a duty to his city. Ever since he descended to ash and came back to life and moved along like everything was normal. He wanted to collapse into May’s arms every time he felt like that. How did she deal, just coming up to rooftops for “breathers”? It would bury him alive if he let things settle down inside him, let even worse things take root and bloom and ripen. 

“I did my homework at school. I guess I was just looking to take a breather too,” he told her, his worlds tumbling out even though he wanted nothing more than to impress the badass lady who intimidated him more than any of the other Avengers. Yeah, even more than the guy with the metal arm who hated him. His interactions with Mr. Falcon made him much less scary. 

“Oh.” She nodded. And then she did something absolutely ridiculous. She came and sat down next to Peter, her legs dangling over the side of the building. Why hadn’t he moved yet? She shouldn’t sit here. Why was she sitting next to him? He was just… Peter. He shouldn’t be having normal conversations with fucking Black Widow. She made a face, a tightening of the lips, and thought was written all over her face but in scribbles that Peter couldn’t decipher. “Is it… has it been okay for you? Have you been okay? I wasn’t… one of them. But I saw everyone go.”

_ Go.  _ He was just glad Aunt May hadn’t seen him  _ go.  _ That he had been in Tony’s arms. It was okay. He was okay!

“I’m fine,” he told her, a lie, a big fat fucking lie, and his nose grew so long it could touch the ground, and he would swear to that. 

She laughed without any sort of humor in her voice. “Yeah, where have I heard that before,” she muttered, and the answer was kind of obvious: her. Everyone around her. That’s what people always sounded like that when that was what they meant. 

They were quiet for a little bit and Peter was struck with how weird his life was. Sometimes he was in class, learning about physics, ignoring that asshole Flash. Sometimes he was fighting crime. Sometimes he was just sitting on a rooftop with a superhero dressed in sweats and wearing her hair up in a ponytail after doing shady business in an office building. Like this was just how it was now.

After a while, she stood up and went back to the stable roof area, where it didn’t seem like he needed to be on high alert to keep her from falling off. He twisted around to watch her as she walked toward the door. She beckoned him on. He could really just drop them off down at the street level, but then she would have to hold onto him and maybe that would be weird. He didn’t know her. He wouldn’t just grab onto Captain America and bring him down to city level. 

“You shouldn’t be in the big stuff like that,” she said, looking over at him. “No matter how much you wanna help.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” he told her, rolling his eyes. Everyone always said that he shouldn’t be doing any of this stuff. But if he didn’t, who was gonna? If he hadn’t intervened that day, who would’ve saved the wizard countless times? Who would’ve kept the bug lady and the blue and red man from falling when Thanos made everything go weird? 

“It  _ is _ ,” she insisted, looking over at him. She stopped on the staircase of this office building, and he wondered how she wasn’t worried about alarms or cameras. She must’ve done something spy-like to them. That was really cool, actually. He would rather focus on that than whatever she was about to say to him. “Peter—you’re Peter, right?” 

He nodded a little bit, just really quick. He felt like there was a whole lecture coming. 

“You’re, what? Fifteen? Sixteen? You shouldn’t be— well, fuck, you shouldn’t be almost  _ dying _ .” She shook her head. “I know Tony’s just trying to do right by you, but you can’t be around the big stuff.”

He let out a breath and took off his mask, running a hand through his messy mask hair. “No. That’s— That’s  _ bullshit _ , Miss Black Widow, ma’am, I’m perfectly  _ capable _ —”

“Okay, yeah, well, I’m capable of tossing you down this staircase right now,” she said, her eyebrows knitted together, “but  _ should I? _ ”

He shook his head vigorously. He didn’t want to, uh, piss this lady off. At all. Especially not when she was reminding him how capable she was of tossing him down a staircase that objectively he knew she wasn’t going to toss him down, but… she was a very capable person and… well, shit, he didn’t want to be tossed down the staircase. 

She shrugged and started walking again. “I don’t know you, I barely know your name. But I know you’re a kid, a  _ good  _ one at that. And I know this shit is not a kid’s life, okay? Trust me on that,” she told him. 

They were going to go down a lot of stairs and he didn’t know how he was going to get through that with her. She seemed like it was just fine. Shit, did she climb this whole staircase earlier? All the way up to the rooftop? Was there anything that she couldn’t do? Or maybe she got up some other way. He didn’t know. She was all enigmatic and absolutely impossible to figure out. Like, it was really cool and all, but it also seemed bad for her health. To always be doing risky, mysterious stuff. 

Well, okay, he guessed that being a spy in  _ general _ was bad for your health. Lots of people didn’t take kindly to lots of spies. Like, for example, the people being spied on by the spies. And what if the camera shit she did wasn’t fixed entirely? What if people saw his face and went,  _ Look at this little spy kid?  _ Ooh, Spy Kids. 

He needed to slow down a little bit. He looked out the window—he loved staircases by windows, actually, wow—and saw all the cars going by despite how late it was. May must have been freaking out. He didn’t think he realized  _ what  _ time it was exactly. 

“A kid shouldn’t be in space,” she said, shaking her head slowly after catching him with his eyes out the window, tying themselves to the things that weren’t here, now, or that didn’t make him think too hard about the Then things, the Then things that constricted his chest way too much. 

He let out a breath and threw his hands up. “Okay, well, if I’m a kid, and I shouldn’t do this or that, why doesn’t anybody help me? Okay? Why doesn’t anyone teach me how to be better at what I  _ can  _ do so that I don’t get hurt? So I can do more on ground level?” 

She laughed and shook her head. “That almost sounds like you wanna learn from me,” she said. And then she looked over him. And saw that he wasn’t looking away, or laughing along with her, and her frown returned full-force. “No, no, no, kid, I don’t have  _ time _ —”

“But you have time to complain about everything else I’m doing,” he pointed out. 

She looked over at him in a way that made him fall back a couple steps, and she moved fast enough to gain a couple on him, and they didn’t talk for a long time. 

By the time he was exhausted and ready to stop moving downwards, they were at the same step again, quietly existing in the same space, both of them thinking, overthinking, steadying themselves outside the window. It was a continuous and shared cycle, and he was tired of having this with her in total silence. Yeah, they had only known each other properly for like twenty minutes, but he was pretty sure it was time to let his big mouth run free. 

“I had a point,” he said, not smugly or anything, but maybe a little smugly, because surely she knew that he did. 

“Maybe.” Okay, so, that was a little shocking, but he was sure going to take it.  _ Yeah _ maybe!  _ Of course  _ maybe! Because he was right! She looked over at him, squarely, not missing a step as she did. “Put your mask back on. We’re getting to ground level.”

“Right! Right,” he said, quickly slipping it back on. That felt like the beginning of something. A grin formed behind the mask, and he was sure the mask was showing how wide his eyes were. “So what does that mean?”

“It  _ means _ you’re a fucking undercover superhero, so maybe don’t blow that,” she told him, and picked up the pace again. 

But that didn’t wipe the grin off his face as he trailed behind her. “You know what this means, right? Spider buddies. Spuddies!” 

“No.” She pointed at him, straight at his face. “You’re not— no. They’ll all start saying that if you keep that up.”

“But we are, aren’t we? Buddies? Spider buddies?”

And like, she didn’t say  _ yeah _ , but she did give him her number, and he texted her a quick  _ spuddies! _ so she had his. So that was kind of definitive, yeah? Yeah, he thought so. 


End file.
